Comment by Sir_Substance
10 years ago
>but what I'd genuinely like to know is why don't big projects just move to their own thing?
Github is a great advertising and marketing platform for large OSS projects. Quite the opposite, large projects should be moving towards github, because it's a great stage for them to perform on. On top of that, it's rather become the defacto replacement for sourceforge (sorry FOSShub, it was a bold try), with all that implies.
The thing I really don't get is why people use it for small projects. Like Facebook, Twitter and basically every other social media site out there, it's a drama factory. It incentivises people towards public grandstanding on creative and technical issues, and encourages resolving disputes by forking the repo, burning bridges and splitting the dev team rather than discussing all aspects of the problem, chewing it over and making a group decision.
That's the last thing small OSS projects need, and I'd have thought most 5-15 man projects would be vastly better off throwing up a kallithea repo (if they don't just use DCVS the real way) and a dokuwiki and then knuckling down to business. I acknowledge that this reduces discoverability by some amount and thus risks taking a hit to your developer acquisition, but I'd love to see some hard numbers on how much. I'd wager that much like the Apple app store, if you're not in the top 50 on github, you're no one.
But hey, I'm apparently an old fogey born young, and I prefer to self-host when I can, so maybe I'm just pointlessly resisting the tide of the inevitable or something.
@Sir_Substance - thank you for the kind mention. I agree with you but don't forget that any Empire will fall sooner or later. People work with enthusiasm at a new project, after a while this new excitement is replaced by greed because the financial thing becomes the most important aspect. At this stage I would say that GitHub is Google, SourceForge is Yahoo and FossHub aims to become DuckDuckGo. We need to improve so instead of throwing us at garbage we would appreciate a constructive criticism. Thank you!
The reason why I thought bigger projects would be more capable of handling this is because team size = more manpower obviously.
> Quite the opposite, large projects should be moving towards github, because it's a great stage for them to perform on. On top of that, it's rather become the defacto replacement for sourceforge.
Not exactly sure what they're supposed to perform better/easier on a shared-hosting locked-in platform. If it's the issue of getting people excited about the project to want to use it or join in and help, it'd be interesting to see if there are any numbers to back this up.
I'm not sure about sourceforge but i never thought of it as a serious thing for big project hosting before github came around.
> It incentivises people towards public grandstanding on creative and technical issues, and encourages resolving disputes by forking the repo, burning bridges and splitting the dev team rather than discussing all aspects of the problem, chewing it over and making a group decision.
Totally. This is a good point I think. I never understood the fascination with obsessive forking (edit: lol, after the letter moved to github it got 2 forks! WHY! https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github) just to apply a patch or change a line of code (there's a lot of those). It's a nice feature and all, but not really that useful imo. I'd like to see some data on forks that haven't been touched as well, amounting to garbage, outdated code basically.
> ... throwing up a kallithea repo (if they don't just use DCVS the real way) and a dokuwiki and then knuckling down to business...
The thing that bugs me the most about Github and the likes is this. It's slowly taking away the will or need to do this. Same as how the use of Slack/Gitter has somewhat eclipsed IRC in OSS world. From my experience, I learn a lot when I'm doing things I don't really want to do or I find tedious because I either discover that there's a detail that I don't understand well or it motivated me to write an automator to sort things out.
> so maybe I'm just pointlessly resisting the tide of the inevitable or something.
Wait until the fixation on cloud crap washes off and everything will be back to normal lol.
>Not exactly sure what they're supposed to perform better/easier on a shared-hosting locked-in platform.
To be clear, I meant perform as in "tap dance routine" and was being metaphorical.
A large project on github gets more exposure than a large project not on github, because it regularly shows up in the "explore" section of the site. A small project on github gets no more exposure than a small project not on github, because it does not.
(I have no citation for this, it's based on my observations only)